He has sat behind an oak desk in wire-rimmed glasses and a day’s growth of beard graying his cheeks.
When he dies, he is reborn nine months later, a baby God. The Kevinian cult has taken everything from seventeen-year-old Minnow: twelve years of her life, her family, her ability to trust. That anyone who happened to walk by that stream on that morning, curious enough to lean over the odd water gushing into the ground, would be made God. THE SACRED LIES OF MINNOW BLY With a harrowing poetic voice, this contemporary page-turner is perfect for fans of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, Julie Berry's All The Truth That's in Me, and the works of Ellen Hopkins. There are some who insist Charlie was simply lucky. And, just as suddenly, the feeling of every cell of every living organism hovering just beneath his fingertips, like piano keys. Sights no human had ever captured with their eyes.
He stared, transfixed, as every star, every galaxy in the universe flicked across his vision. Charlie wanted to see where the water went. He came upon a stream that fell away, suddenly, into the earth. When Charlie was just becoming something more than a boy, he went out into the creaking, old-growth forest to collect firewood. Charlie was the son of a poor miller, a mean man with a gammy leg and a spray of powder burns over his right temple from the war. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency.“It is the story of God.” God’s real name is Charlie, he told us. Minnow was five when her parents followed Prophet Kevin into the wilderness to found a rustic commune of Kevinians, who worship the God Charlie and obey prophesies divinely dictated to Kevin, such as, “It is my Commandment that ye do again this task, with Minnow, daughter of Samuel, for she be in need of spiritual intervention of the kind that marriage provides.” The narrative weaves between the hellish prison of the past that Minnow longed to escape and the juvenile prison she enters, which becomes an unexpected haven where she learns to read, make friends, and “think about the universe, and the earth, and the stars.” As Minnow recounts both shocking cruelty and acts of kindness-most movingly from her one friend outside the commune, the boy she assaulted, and her “lifer” cellmate-suspense, dread, and hope intermingle in Oakes’s charged, page-turning debut. A harrowing opening scene immerses readers in 17-year-old narrator Minnow’s trauma, as she responds to a perceived threat with astonishing brutality, while carrying the skeletal remains of her own amputated hands.
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